Anti-Regime Activists Challenge Former High Ranking Iranian Official at Dartmouth College

(YouTube screenshot)

Anti-regime activists confronted a former high-ranking Iranian official implicated in the regime’s crimes against humanity during his recent appearance at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Specifically, they challenged Seyed Hossein Mousavian about his alleged involvement in the assassinations of Iranian dissidents in Germany while he served as Iran’s ambassador to that country from 1990 to 1997.

Mousavian, who currently works as a professor at Princeton University, wrung his hands nervously as he was questioned, suggesting that he was somewhat shaken up by the confrontation.

“When he realized he was going to be challenged, he got nervous,” said Aidin Shobnam, an organizer with Boston to Iran, a Massachusetts-based anti-regime human rights group. “He got scared. He was intimidated by our mere presence.”

Mousavian’s comeuppance took place at a September 30, 2024, panel discussion organized by the Jewish Studies and Middle East Studies programs at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The event was titled “Israel and Iran: The Future of the Middle East.” In addition to Mousavian, the talk featured Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institution, whose former president, retired Gen. John R. Allen, resigned in 2022 in the face of an investigation into his ties to the Qatari government.

For her part, Maloney was quite critical of the Iranian regime, highlighting its role in destabilizing the Middle East through its support for Hamas, Hezbollah, and Shia militias across the region. These groups, she said, “produced what we saw on October 7 in terms of death and destruction, and there’s no purpose to this. There’s no positive agenda whatsoever here. It is purely violence and destruction, and it is not worthy of the Iranian people. Iranians would not choose to enact those policies.” Later in the talk, she declared that the foundation of the Iranian regime is hostility toward the United States and Israel.

In his response to Maloney’s opening statement, Mousavian accused Israel of refusing to accept a two-state solution since 1947, suggesting that this refusal, and not Iranian aggression, was the cause of the conflict in the Middle East. He then called for “broad negotiations” between the United States and Iran, a resurrection of the nuclear deal, and a rapprochement between Iran and its Arab neighbors in the region. He closed his opening statement by declaring, “We need a ceasefire between Iran and Israel.”

Mousavian’s self-portrayal as a credible commentator seeking peace was challenged during the question-and-answer period when Shabnam Pahani, an Iranian-American of Bahai descent who fled the country in the early 2000s, got a hold of the microphone. After citing his alleged involvement with the assassination of Iranian dissidents while serving as Iran’s ambassador to Germany, she asked, “How do you as a representative of that regime justify these actions? How do you reconcile your role in defending such a regime?”

Mousavian responded that Pahani’s questions were based on lies, that there were “zero allegations” against him in German court documents related to the assassinations in question, and that he has been allowed back into Germany numerous times since his time as ambassador to that country. Mousavian also declared that in 1996, “rogue elements” of the regime governing the Islamic Republic of Iran sent an assassination team after him while serving as ambassador to Germany.
Whatever prompted regime officials to allegedly seek his death, it wasn’t enough to stop leaders in Tehran from appointing Mousavian to other positions of responsibility in subsequent years. He was head of the foreign relations committee of Iran’s National Security Council from 1997 to 2005. He also served as the spokesman for Iran in its nuclear negotiations from 2003 to 2005 and as a foreign policy advisor to the Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council from 2005 to 2007. (Because of these ties, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce investigated Princeton for its decision to hire Mousavian.)

The notion that Mousavian had nothing to do with the assassinations in Europe is countered by the testimony of a former regime insider. In March 2024, Iran International reported that Abolghasem Mesbahi, a founder of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security of the Islamic Republic of Iran, testified before a German court in 1997 and apparently implicated Mousavian in the assassinations of Kurdish leaders in Germany. According to Iran International, the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel reported that year that Mesbahi told the Berlin court during the trial regarding the assassination of a dissident that “Mousavian participated in most of the [Iranian regime’s] crimes that took place in Europe.”

Mousavian is a man of the regime. In addition to affirming Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie after the publication of Satanic Verses, telling Spiegel, a prominent German magazine, “I hate him,” in 1993, he also attended the funeral of Qasem Soleimani after his assassination by the United States in 2020.

Despite his nervousness, Mousavian went out of his way to tell Pahani that he “respected” her opposition to the regime and had no desire to humiliate her about what she had suffered. Still, the confrontation clearly left a bad taste in his mouth. This was revealed the day after the Dartmouth event, when Mousavian lashed out on his X account in Persian at Iranian-Americans opposed to the Islamic Republic and this journalist for sending him press queries. On X, he described the activists who objected to his participation in the discussion as “treacherous.”

Mousavian’s appearance at Dartmouth College, an Ivy League institution, has raised serious concerns about his influence on American foreign policy. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) that, “It has been long established that this person was long involved with the crimes of the Iranian regime and endorsed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie.”

Asaf Romirowsky, the executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), told FWI that “Since Seyed Hossein Mousavian’s appointment at Princeton in 2009, there have been significant concerns about Iranian ties and interest at the university and in the academy at large.”

Romirowsky added that by attending Qasem Soleimani’s funeral in 2020, Mousavian revealed his true colors. Soleimani “served as the head of the Quds Force, a division of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC),” a group responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. soldiers. “His latest invite to speak at Dartmouth is yet another indicator of how universities are normalizing antisemitism and advancing the Iranian regime’s interest in the US rather than fighting these very forces that are committed to the destruction of Israel and the US.”

Dartmouth officials declined to comment, as did Mousavian himself, who complained of being approached by a “Zionist Israeli journalist, supported by the Israeli lobby” in a post on X.

The Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists (AAIRIA) protested Mousavian’s appearance at the Dartmouth event, citing his praise for former Iranian Vice President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May. Raisi was a member of the “Death Committee,” which determined who lived and who died during a spate of mass killings perpetrated by the regime in the late 1980s.

“This atrocity was acknowledged in the recent Swedish court case of Hamid Nouri,” declared Lawdan Bazargan, AAIRIA founder and leader. “Mousavian’s defense of Raisi further demonstrates his alignment with a regime involved in atrocities and genocide.”

For their part, those who called on Dartmouth to cancel Mousavian’s appearance pledged to challenge the former diplomat about his past whenever he shows up.

“If he’s in driving distance,” said Shobnam Pahani, “we’ll be there.”